Blueberries held up as secret to long life

By SIMON COLLINS

Mary Ann Lila reckons she is improving her chances of living to 100 by eating half a cup of blueberries a day.

Professor Lila, of the University of Illinois, says her research has validated legends that a diet of wild blueberries helps to keep people alive into old age in parts of Russia and among the Eskimos.

She has found that rats fed on blueberries do not lose their memories as they get older - and can even get their memories back once they start on a blueberry-rich menu.

"Every single morning I'll make breakfast with blueberries. Half a cup is all you need," she said.

"It's inexpensive, you can throw it in a smoothie or on top of something else, as long as it's fresh.

"When you cook it, it changes, and you might be adding sugar and other things that are bad for you.

"But it also becomes more quickly available, so there are some good things about cooking too."

Professor Lila, a guest speaker at a conference of the Plant Tissue Culture and Biotechnology Association at Leigh, is working on blueberries with Dr Kevin Davies of Crop & Food Research in Palmerston North.

She said there were independent legends about the effects of blueberries on longevity from cultures in several parts of the world, including the Eskimos.

"It's common for them to live well over 100 years."

She has found that blueberries and other plants of the vaccinium family, such as cranberries and boysenberries, produce antioxidant effects which are beneficial to the brain and to the body's power to fight cancer.

Professor Lila said all human brain cells were constantly being replaced, with old cells dying and new cells being created.



For example, tests showed that older rats could not keep paddling on a log in water for as long as a young rat, and took much longer to find a shallow place in a pool after being removed from the pool for three days.

Young rats could remember where the shallow place was and swam to it immediately.

The tests showed that older rats did much better as soon as they were fed a diet containing 2 per cent blueberries.

However, it appeared that the best blueberries were a wild kind which grew especially strongly to combat a stressful environment.

"In Alaska and in regions of Russia these berries grow under very intense conditions, sometimes 20 hours of light and intensely cold temperatures."

Professor Lila said her research results had only proved the effects of the berries in the past six to eight months and were still preliminary.

Herald feature: Health